"That the Andamanese are not a local development but the remnant of a once widely-spread race is shown by the fact that they are not the only Negritos: there are the other living Negrito groups that we will look at in more detail in Chapters 35 to 37.
As regards the remoter relationships, there are two opposing schools of thought. The first holds that the Negritos were one group living in a large area of tropical Asia many tens of thousands of years ago when new and more aggressive immigrants arrived who pushed the ancestral Negritos and Veddoids into the remoter jungle areas. In such a scenariothe Negrito and Veddoid groups in mainland areas would then gradually have lost contact with each other, leaving us today with only a few widely separated surviving populations.
The second school of thought holds that all these groups share a common ancestral origin somewhere in southeast Asia or southern China. In this scenario the Negritos and the Veddoids have alwayys remained people of the deep forests (hence their small stature, which woould then not be an ancestral trait but the result of similar life styles in the deep forests) while the ancestors of the Tasmanians, Papuans and Australians left the area to migrate to their later homelands. The latter groups must have been highly enterprising: they are the earliest people known to have made substantial sea crossings.
The genetic and linguistic varieties gives a hint at the sheer complexity of past population movements in what for want of a better word we shall call the Negritoid-Veddoid ancestral area: the number of living indigenous languages still spoken in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua-New Guinea and Australia has been estimated at over 1400 (of which 750 in Papua-New Guinea alone) which is more than a quarter of all the world's languages. There are another 170 still living languages in Australia. The number of extinct languages in that area is likely to be much greater still.
Looking at the overall picture, we can see an outline, however vague and shadowy, of the area that the hypothetical ancestral race of Negritos, Veddoids, Papuans, Australians, Tasmanians and Melanesians once occupied, perhaps 70,000 years ago. It ranged from India through Indo-China to Indonesia and from southern China through Taiwan to the Philippines, with New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania settled later by the same people.
While the anthropological and linguistic evidence for a relationship is often weak and controversial nature, what, then, about the biological and genetic evidence? A recent work on genetic relationships among human groups says the following:
While our potential skills for analyzing human evolution are increasing, social changes taking place in developing countries are rapidly destroying the identities - if not the very existence - of the most important aboriginal populations. This organized research efforts to save this precious information about our past have acquired a new urgency.
A complete genetic investigation of the Negrito, the Veddoid and other remnant population groups with the techniques of DNA analysis is both important and urgent. Happily, many genetic laboratories all around the world have taken up the challenge.
The following data comparing a number of major as well as remnant groups Asian are based on outdated techniques of the 1980s to 1990s but they still remain valuable until the DNA analyses in preparation and planned are published."